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RESTORING THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

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Most travelers to outposts of the old world know what it is to feel time receding. On the steps of the Senate in Rome, toward dusk when the crowds have fled the Forum, the visitor has only to filter out the traffic noise to imagine how it was in Julius Caesar's time. In Leningrad, before the Hermitage museum on a snowy winter's night, the last days of the Romanovs in their winter palace can suddenly spring to life.

In China, the oldest continuous civilization of all, it is not always easy for the mind to track backward in time. In their haste to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving each year, the custodians of the country's greatest relics are making major efforts at physical restoration, but frequently the sense of history is lost for the want of attention to milieu. Too often, there is too much noise, too much commercialization, too great an obtrusion of the present into the precincts of the past.

Nowhere is this more noticeable than at the Great Wall. Since Richard Nixon made his pilgrimage in 1972, just about every American reaching Peking has made the 50-mile trek north to Badaling, the site chosen by the Communist government in 1956 when it ordered the first major restoration of the wall in centuries. Arriving there, like Mr. Nixon, almost everybody has been struck by the sheer volume of the masonry and the scope of the labor involved, but the spirit of the place has been disappointingly elusive.

''It is a great wall,'' said Mr. Nixon, in what the press corps at the time took for one of his famous tautologies. In fact, the former President captured - perhaps inadvertently - the blandness of the scene. There is no museum; the surrounding hills are mostly bare of vegetation, and in winter it is bitingly cold. With the encouragement of tourism and small-scale private enterprise in recent years things have deteriorated still further. Those joining the press of humanity atop the wall are instantly set upon by hawkers of ''I climbed the Great Wall'' T-shirts, of fake Ming Dynasty coins and of much other bric-a-brac.

Much of this is about to change. On Oct. 1 the Bureau of Relics in Peking will officially open a new site for visitors to the wall. It is in Mutianyu, a village nestling amid the Yan Mountains northeast of Peking. It is the first major restoration of the wall in the Peking area since Badaling in the 1950's and the largest of at least five similar projects under way along a 1,000-mile stretch of the wall from the province of Liaoning to the province of Shanxi. Together, the projects make for the biggest upgrading of the wall since it ceased being a defensive battery with the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in 1644.

As officials in Peking envisage it, Mutianyu will draw off at least two million visitors a year from Badaling, where four million tourists are expected by the end of this year. At each site, about one third of the visitors will be foreigners, the others Chinese. For the majority of Americans who visit China as members of groups with prearranged itineraries, it may be difficult to make the switch, but the advantages of the new site justify the effort. With the number of visitors rising rapidly each year, Badaling will continue to be the busier of the two sites, and other factors are even more compelling.

Mutianyu is closer to Peking, about 45 miles from most hotels in the center of the city. The road is also better, a modern divided highway for the first 30 miles or so giving way to a narrower road that winds gently through lush countyside for the last 15 miles. In place of the rugged brown hills that are the prelude to Badaling, the approaches to Mutianyu are a vista of rice paddies, wheat fields and beekeepers' hives, with a glimpse here and there of peasants bathing and washing their clothes in a broad stream.

Workers will be busy right up to opening day with the last mile or so of road, a once dusty track that has been widened and surfaced to carry traffic to two parking lots a few hundred yards apart at the base of the mountains. One is in the village of Mutianyu, a sleepy hollow that is a picture of rural China with donkey carts and whispy-bearded old men sunning themselves on their stoops. From there a climb of 1,060 freshly cut white granite steps winds steeply upward to the wall through orchards and groves, which are absent at Badaling.

When I made the climb with my family on a scorching weekend morning last month it was an endurance test. With the temperature in the mid-90's, our 10-year-old son bounded ahead with his 4-year-old brother, leaving their mother and an English nanny trailing with their infant sister. I had resolved to carry our picnic to the wall, about 1,400 feet above sea level, but yielded to impulse along the way and persuaded a friendly village woman to hire out her donkey. With the impedimenta safely roped to the animal's back, she disappeared up a nearby trail and was at the top, waiting, by the time we arrived.

For some Americans, the challenge of the steps may prove irresistible. For others, it will be a relief to learn that a company formed jointly by the Chinese and a Hong Kong concern will be building a cable car route this winter from the second parking lot to the summit, carrying up to 1,500 passengers an hour. Workers are already busy preparing the lower terminal and a restau-rant capable of seating 1,000 people. Officials hope to have the cable car in operation by May 1.

In time the Relics Bureau envisages a similar cable car for Badaling. There, buses and cars halt within a short, level walk of the wall, but the precipitous climb along the wall to either side has been too much for many visitors, particularly older ones. In this, as in other instances, Mutianyu has an advantage, with thick stands of oak and sycamore trees to hide the pylons that will support the aerial car's cables. At Badaling, where generations of peasants have stripped the hillsides bare for firewood and building timber, disguising the route will be more difficult.

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In both places the restored sections of the wall date from the Ming Dynasty, when millions of soldiers and peasants worked over a period of two centuries to construct a fortification from the Yalu River, now the border with North Korea, westward to Jiayuguan Pass in the province of Gansu. (The total lenghth of the wall itself is about 1,500 miles.) With a granite base and a brick superstructure, the Ming sections proved more lasting than earthenware portions constructed in the Qin and Han dynasties more than 1,200 years earlier. But the wall's relevance for the empire's defense ended in 1644, when a disaffected general, Wu Sangui, opened the gate to Manchu invaders at Shanhaiguan 100 miles east of Mutianyu.

As at Badaling, the mile-long section of wall at Mutianyu is dotted with two-story watchtowers, sections of steep steps and crenelated battlements. But at Mutianyu, far more than at Badaling, the imagination can leap backward across the centuries. Looking north, the eye takes in a panorama of plunging mountains and valleys, with mud-colored sections of the Han and Qin walls clearly visible. Looking back down the valley, the back-breaking work for laborers who lived and died building the wall becomes almost tangible. A facsimile of their travails exists in the donkeyloads of sand and bricks that ascend the mountain from dawn to dusk each day, serving the crews that are putting finishing touches on the restoration. Unlike their ancestors, the hundreds of Mutianyu villagers drafted into the work are paid, albeit at a rate of barely $1 a day. Ironically, some of the stones and bricks being used are making their second trip up the mountain, five centuries after their first, having been looted by peasants 15 or 20 years ago during the Cultural Revolution.

The extent of damage done to the wall then is difficult to gauge, but it was serious enough to persuade the State Council in Peking to issue a decree imposing stiff penalties on peasants who might continue to use the bricks for their pigsties and chicken runs. One peasant west of Peking who built a kiln out of stones looted from the wall was heavily fined earlier this year and ordered to replace the stones at his own expense. When another peasant volunteered the return of 3,000 stones that he had used to extend his house and pigsty, he was publicly commended and rewarded with a free truckload of replacement bricks.

The stillness that we found atop the wall at Mutianyu will hardly last once the site opens, at least at times of peak visits. But those wishing to enjoy the area without crowds could skip the tourist buses and take a taxi from Peking, either early or late. Fares vary but are unlikely to be much more than $35 round trip. Foreigners belonging to a Peking church group that holds Easter Sunday services at dawn atop the Great Wall at Badaling swear that there is no better time to see the wall than when the sun is rising over the hills.

Anybody who has seen Mutianyu in its pristine state must wonder how it will change once visitors come flooding in. But officials at the Relics Bureau say that lessons learned at Badaling will help prevent commercialization from spoiling the area. ''At Badaling we were overtaken by the open-door policy before we could take precautions,'' said Hu Xinfa, the director, referring to reforms of the past five years that have allowed small-scale private enterprise to flourish.

According to Mr. Hu, from now on state shops selling souvenirs at both Badaling and Mutianyu will be kept about 600 feet from the wall, and free-enterprise hawkers will be kept at least 1,500 feet away. However, experience suggests that enforcing the regulations will be difficult. Tickets to the wall at both sites cost only 17 cents (for foreigners, the tariff is double), and coin changers, at least, should have little trouble getting by.

For visitors with more time, a third wall site worth visiting is in Shanhaiguan, 125 miles east of Peking, where the Ming Dynasty wall runs into the sea. It was there that Wu Sangui, the traitor, opened the gate to the Manchus. Those making the train trip of five to seven hours from Peking can mount the newly restored East Gate, a two-story, double-roof tower in classic Ming style that looks much as though it had been lifted from the Forbidden City. Amid the freshly painted reds and greens and blues of the upper eaves hangs the famous wooden tablet bearing the legend ''The first pass under heaven,'' signifying the spot, the ancient Chinese believed, that divided the world into civilized China and barbarians.

In Shanhaiguan there is a small museum displaying Ming weapons and battle dress as well as pictures of the area dating from the turn of the century. About two miles to the east of the gate travelers can walk to the spot where the wall crumbles into the sea. Restoration work is under way nearby, but there is no sign of an effort to rebuild the legendary carved dragon's head that faced the sea at the end of the wall, long since disintegrated by centuries of tides and vandalism.

Although the wall has a special place in the hearts of all Chinese -Mr. Hu of the Relics Bureau calls it ''the foremost symbol of our nationhood'' - it is only one of dozens of sites that the bureau is restoring in the vicinity of Peking. One of these, the tomb of the Ming Emperor Lung-Ching, who died in 1572, will absorb a large portion of the budget of $5.5 million appropriated by central and local governments. Accordingly, officials are placing heavy reliance on a special fund inaugurated last year by the Relics Bureau to help with restoration of the wall. That fund is known as the ''Love Our China and Repair Our Great Wall Social Contribution Activity Committee.''

In the Peking area alone, the fund, overseen by Mr. Hu at the Municipal Relics Management Bureau, has collected $2.4 million in its first year, and another $6.9 million has been contributed in other provinces along the wall's path. Of this, about $1 million has been spent at Mutianyu and for repairing 1,300 feet of the wall at Badaling. Contributions are being solicited worldwide, and nearly 100 Americans, mostly of Chinese origin, are listed among the donors.

JOHN F. BURNS is chief of the Peking bureau of The New York Times.

A version of this article appears in print on September 8, 1985, on Page 10010012 of the National edition with the headline: RESTORING THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe